Case Study: Rent-A-Center Buys Own Accounting Solution

Rent-A-Center, which has about 2,800 stores nationwide and continues to expand, lets each of its store managers purchase supplies and services from local vendors. The invoices are then put into packets and shipped to the company's headquarters in Plano, Texas, for processing and payment upon arrival.

And arrive they do--at a rate of about 4,000 a day. To make matters worse, the company deals with more than 100,000 vendors and is adding 100 to 150 new vendors per week. The invoices come in all shapes and sizes, and some are handwritten. "It's a nightmare for us," said Kristi Toupal, who runs Rent-A-Center's accounts payable department.

Toupal had a staff of 25 people keying data from the invoices into a Lawson Software accounting system. But what was really eating up staff resources was having to constantly chase down paper invoices due to the almost daily presence of tax auditors and requests from line-of-business managers, whose pay is tied to their profit-and-loss statements. She figured an electronic archiving system would be just the ticket.

At an accounting industry trade show, Toupal ran into Kofax, which was showing off its new Ascent For Payables vertical market package. The product couples Kofax's Ascent Capture software and Advanced Forms Solution with prebuilt modules geared toward invoices. Rather then relying only on templates, the software picks out the appropriate data from just about any invoice with varying degrees of accuracy.

Irvine, Calif.-based Kofax then introduced Toupal to BIS, Edmond, Okla. Toupal said she went with Kofax and BIS because they used her invoices to demonstrate the tool's ability to process semistructured documents. "We needed a solution that was very freeform," she said.

BIS, an 18-year-old document imaging solution provider with 65 employees, brought its own expertise to bear. Among other things, it tuned the system to get about 80 percent accuracy on invoices. To speed up verification, it wrote a custom verification module that pulls up matching vendor names from the Lawson database and automatically tabs through fields, highlighting questionable entries, at the department's 13 validation workstations. It also installed Legato ApplicationXtender document management software for storing the images, tied the solution into the Lawson system and added its own application for calling up canceled check images in the Legato repository.

"Ascent Capture has a very open architecture that is easy to develop add-on components for," said David Annis, vice president and chief technology officer at BIS.

For Toupal, the end result was a staff reduction from 25 people to 15 since the system went live in September 2003 and a system that paid for itself in less than a year.

The technology spread virally through the organization. Seeing the success in Toupal's group, other departments began clamoring for imaging solutions. Now 13 departments, including legal, human resources and payroll, are or will soon be scanning images into the Legato repository.

"With the infrastructure in place, bringing on new departments is just a matter of increasing software licenses," Annis said. "It would be costly to buy a separate system for every one of these departments."

The investment is paying off in other ways too. With the exception of pilot projects, this was the first-ever deployment of Ascent for Payables since its release in early 2003. Now Kofax has 50 partners certified on the product and 30 to 50 deals in the works, said Anthony Macciola, Kofax's vice president of marketing and development. BIS alone has two or three deals in various stages of implementation and is able to reuse the modules it developed for Rent-A-Center, Annis said.